edtech

Our 4th Grade Texas History iBook on Native Americans of Texas is Now in iTunes. Native Americans of Texas describes the various tribes of Native Americans who populated Texas prior to 1830. This work is created by 4th grade students in Mrs. Belita Morris’s Texas History class at Clear Creek Intermediate School in Sanger ISD. The students worked very hard on their chapters while having fun. They were really excited to see their work get published….

Spreading the message is something that I am extremely passionate about. Encouragement, inspiration, enticement, instruction, and support are the primary tools I use to create change through communication and collaboration. Technology has made the world a very small place, enabling us to readily interact with larger and larger circles of teachers than ever before. I communicate with educators across the globe through social media including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Google+. This allows me…

by Cassie Miller We started the iBooks Author project as an experiment for our IT director, Chris Miller. None of the kids knew how to use it, as it had been out as an app for just a short time. I couldn’t help them or teach them how to use it – I was clueless! I could help with the content, but the kids had to figure the how-to and ins-and-outs on their own. And…

Instructional Coaching with the EdTech Quintet photo by Oliver Tacke – CC license There are many, many approaches to doing instructional coaching to help teachers leverage technology for learning. I often find that teachers have difficulty coming up with tech activities to use in their daily teaching in a way that makes meaningful connections with curriculum. There are many great models to help guide teachers, including SAMR, TPCK, TIM, etc. Lately, I’ve been using the…

GIFsmos.com – Have Students Learn About Functions by Creating Animated GIFs GIFsmos.com is a free site where you and your students can create animated gifs with functions on a graphing calculator simulator. There are a variety of uses for this including showing the relation between parent and child functions, translations, rotations, etc. It’s easy to use, just follow the steps below to get started! First go to gifsmos.com to get started. Enter your formula in…

Quizlet is at it’s very basic, a web based flash card generator. Quizlet is much more than this. The site itself allows you to play games and even take tests, all with the click of a button. You can share your card decks and even import and modify decks created by others. Innovative and clever teachers and students have been able to think outside the box and leverage Quizlet in combination with other apps or…

Resources from Mac OS X: BootCamp TCEA 2015 #learnanywhere What happens when I forget what I learned? Apple Learning Series What the Heck is %$#@ and How Do I Use It? What the Heck is the Cloud? Access Apple Apps in the Cloud iTunes Family Sharing Personalizing My Mac with System Preferences Finding My Junk with Spotlight Sharing Stuff with AirDrop Keeping your Mac healthy and happy Verify and Repair with DiskUtility Fix Permissions Reset…

As requested by Jessie Hooper, here are some sites to find virtual dice to roll. Each of these have animation, which makes the experience a little nicer for the students. Jessie was using these to teach counting to her Pre-K students in centers, but the links can just as easily be used for teaching probability in later grades. Virtual Dice – has a decent animation – not very dice like. http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks1/maths/dice/index.htm VirtualDiceRoll.com – a little more realistic with…

Welcome to Edtechspirations by EdTechChris. This site will be a landing page for future blog posts, free edtech teacher lessons and tips, as well as training resources. Please be patient as existing content is being migrated from other sites. For those of you who are just getting to know me, this blog and site specializes in helping teachers implement technology in their curriculum in a meaningful way in order to engage students, challenging them to…